FMT and AC STG Mysteries

There is perhaps no series as ubiquitous in the world of shooting games as Raiden. You can find Raiden games on the Atari Jaguar, PC, Nintendo Switch, and every PlayStation, and every once in a while they make a new one. It has endured through the years when other series have not.

And it all goes back to the original Raiden arcade game from 1990. Its success in Japan and North America ensured ports on numerous platforms, including this one for the FM Towns, a computer from Fujitsu that was only available in Japan.

I don't have much to say about the game itself except that it's a pretty good version of Raiden, and it has an arranged CD soundtrack. Naturally, there is some question as to who was involved in the development, hence this post.

FM Towns Raiden was published by KID, a fairly prolific developer in its day. But the name of another very prolific developer, Success, also appears on and in the game, and the game is listed on their website. So who developed it?

Former KID sound designer Nobuyuki Shioda talked about the programmer on Twitter. They were a University of Tokyo student who also programmed Isolated Warrior for the NES (Max Warrior for the Famicom in Japan). They went to an arcade not knowing what kind of game Raiden was, cleared it on one coin, then came back and made what one magazine called a "perfect port."

Back in 2004, the old KID Damashii website also mentioned this programmer, "Taka," adding that they also worked on G.I. Joe. The name "Y. Takashina" appears in a text string in Raiden's main executable.

The developer mysteries don't end there. Video of the unreleased arcade shooter Choujuuki Spriggan Powerd, apparently related to Compile's Spriggan games, has surfaced online.

The KID logo can be found on the board, which you can see here. That seems pretty clear-cut, right? And Nobuyuki Shioda recalled seeing it on "Yagawa's desk," presumably referring to shooter programmer Shinobu Yagawa, who once worked at KID. However, a former member of Compile has also claimed to have worked on this.